Bruce floated in warmth, though it was not water exactly. Water had cold, weight, and the threat of drowning. This was softer than that, a dark warmth wrapped around him from every side, holding him without pain, hunger, breath, or shape.
At first, he was only a small, round thing drifting in the dark. Then something struck him. Then another. Then many more, tiny twitching shapes battering against him from every side. Bruce did not understand what they were, or what he was, but then one of them pushed through and slipped inside, becoming part of him in a way that made everything go still.
Then growth began.
He felt himself changing from the inside out. Something was building around him, piece by piece, following instructions he could not hear. Tiny limbs began where there had been nothing. A curl formed that might one day become a spine. The faint suggestion of a head took shape. He was alive, or becoming alive, though he still had his thoughts, his memories, and the terrible white flash of the mansion burning in his mind.
But where were his eyes? His nose? His hands? Why did he feel like a little wiggling thing floating in warm goo?
Bruce tried very hard to understand what he was. Human, maybe. Or alien. Or possibly a blind mole.
That idea stayed with him longer than it should have. He could not see. He was buried in darkness. He had tiny twitching limbs. Maybe the Godling had turned him into something useful, like a mole. Moles dug tunnels. Moles found things underground. Maybe he could dig people out of collapsed buildings.
That sounded useful.
Maybe he was going to be a rescue mole. The thought comforted him for almost three seconds before he felt the second heartbeat.
The first was small and wet, a soft pulse learning how to be alive. The second was different. Quieter, but deeper. A warm hum tucked inside the first beat, like a candle burning inside a lantern.
The light-heart.
It pulsed at his center, white and steady, sending thin threads of brightness through his forming body. It did not force him to grow. It guided him. It mended him before he was even broken, setting every small piece into place.
Bruce focused on it, and the light-heart answered.
Then the world opened. For one flashing instant, he was back at the mansion, only now it was daylight. Where the building had been, there was only a crater. Not just a hole from a fuel tank, but a deep, ugly wound in the earth, as if something massive hidden inside the mansion had gone up with it. Black earth steamed beneath the winter sky. Trees stood snapped and burned around the blast. Cars lay scattered in a broken ring, some overturned, some twisted open, some half-buried in ash and snow.
Bruce floated above it all, searching for movement, but nothing moved. The place was dead.
Where was Frank?
He looked everywhere, desperate for a sign. A footprint, a voice, a shape in the snow. Anything that proved Frank had made it, but there was nothing. No bodies, no movement, no Frank.
That did not mean he was dead. It could not mean that.
Frank was different. He had been overseas for years, doing things he never liked to talk about. Secret missions, probably. Special forces stuff. The kind of work that had turned him into the quiet, hard-eyed man who saw danger in every corner and always knew where the exits were.
If anyone could survive a mansion exploding, it was Frank.
Bruce clung to that thought with everything he had. Frank had to be alive. He had to be.
Then the vision shifted.
Around the crater strips of yellow police tape appeared. Men in uniforms moved around the edge like tiny figures on a wound, marking evidence, taking pictures, speaking into radios Bruce could not hear.
Days passed in a blur. Snow fell, melted, and fell again. The police disappeared. The tape sagged and froze. The crater remained, dark and ugly beneath the pale sky.
Then Sarah came.
Bruce knew her instantly. She stood at the rim with Frank's two children close beside her, their small hands clinging to her coat as if she were the only thing keeping them upright. Her pale hair moved in the wind. Her face looked hollow, exhausted, older than it should have.
In her hands were flowers.
For a long moment, she only stared down into the crater. Then she threw the flowers in.
After that, she broke. She dropped to her knees, one hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking as the children stood beside her, frightened and confused, too young to understand the size of what had been taken from them.
Bruce tried to reach for her, to comfort her and ask where was Frank. But the vision did not let him touch her, and time did not stop for his grief.
It moved on.
The crater slowly changed. Trucks arrived. Machines filled the wound with earth and stone. Men in hardhats climbed in and out of the hole. Timber rose. Concrete poured. Wires were pulled. Walls took shape where ashes had been.
Something new was being built over the old ruin. Men got jobs because of it. Families came and went. Grass returned. Flowers grew where fire had swallowed snow.
Bruce felt comfort at the sight of it. At least something good came from all of this. Yet he could not see Sarah anymore, and time was moving too fast now. Years blurred. The mountain fell away. The world widened beneath him.
The vision lifted Bruce higher and higher, through cloud and blue air, until Earth curved beneath him, bright and fragile against the dark.
At first, humanity only grew.
Cities spread across the continents like constellations. Roads multiplied. Towers climbed toward the sky. Ships crossed oceans, and the night side of the world filled with light until whole nations seemed to glow.
Then came smoke and fire.
Nuclear light bloomed across the surface in brief, terrible flashes. Cities vanished. Borders burned. The planet scarred over, its oceans darkened, its land wounded almost beyond recognition.
Earth was dying, and still, humanity did not stop.
From the broken world, ships rose. They climbed through the damaged atmosphere like sparks refusing to be extinguished. Machines unfolded in orbit. Scaffolds formed. Metal joined metal, and above the ruined planet, a vast station began to take shape.
Then the Moon changed.
Glass and steel spread across its craters. Domes glowed in the darkness. Towers rose from gray dust. Engines burned, ships gathered, and one by one they pushed outward, carrying humanity across the solar system.
Bruce watched in stunned silence as the light-heart pulled him farther still.
The Sun shrank behind him. The planets became points. The Milky Way opened around him in a river of silver and fire, then fell away until even the galaxy itself became only a bright smear in the endless dark.
Between galaxies, space stretched so vast and empty that Bruce felt smaller than thought. And still, the vision carried him onward.
For a long while, there was nothing. No stars close enough to warm the dark. No worlds. No light except the faint glow of himself moving through the endless black.
Then something passed beside him. Bruce felt it before he understood it. A shadow so large it seemed to blot out the universe. It was a ship, but it wasn't alone.
Seventeen of them moved through the void in silent procession, not ships as Bruce understood ships, but cities wrapped in armor. Nations of steel. Vast, cathedral-shaped monsters with towers rising from their backs, gun batteries along their flanks, hangars like open mouths, and engines dark as dead suns.
One passed close enough that Bruce could see its side stretch away farther than any skyline he had ever known.
Most of its windows were black. Here and there, a few lights still flickered behind the glass, weak and scattered, like candles burning in an abandoned city.
Upon the hull, half-buried beneath grime and age, Bruce saw an imperial crest worked into the metal: a black eagle with three crowned heads, its great wings spread wide like torn banners. A shield rested against its breast, while its talons clutched the old symbols of rule—scepter, orb, sword, and oath.
The symbol meant nothing to Bruce, and yet it struck something deep in him, as if he were looking at the remnant of an empire too old, too proud, and too stubborn to die.
The ships were magnificent, yet they seemed as if they were also dying.
Their armor was burned, cracked, and patched in places. Gun batteries hung broken from their mounts. Sections of hull were sealed beneath blackened plates. Across one ship, long claw marks had torn through towers and walls, each gouge large enough to swallow a city block, yet almost small against the impossible size of the vessel itself.
Whatever had done that to them had been enormous.
The vision chased after them.
Stars gathered ahead. A new galaxy opened, bright and spiraling, and the seventeen ships crossed into it like drifting hulls.
Then a solar system appeared with a yellow sun, and a single blue-green continental world.
The planet turned quietly beneath white clouds, with wide oceans and untouched continents. No city lights shone on its night side. No satellites circled above it. No scars marked its surface. It looked young and unmarked.
The seventeen ships descended toward it. At first, Bruce thought they were landing. Then he felt the wrongness.
The ships were too dark. Too silent. Their formation wavered. No guiding lights moved across their hulls. No signals flashed between them. No living hands corrected their fall.
They were not arriving, they were falling.
Emergency engines flared too late, blue-white fire bursting from their bellies as ancient systems woke in panic. Thrusters fought against gravity. Dead machines made dead calculations, but there was no saving it.
The first ark struck the planet like judgment.
An ocean rose into the sky. Mountains cracked. Fire spread across the horizon. Then the second ship fell, and the third, and the rest followed one by one, seventeen falling worlds crashing into the living one below.
The planet screamed without sound.
Ash climbed into the heavens. Forests vanished beneath fire. Seas boiled black. The sky closed over, thick and dark, until sunlight became only a memory behind the shroud.
Time rushed forward.
Days became seasons. Seasons became years. For a long age, the world lay buried beneath ash and storm. The broken ark ships rested where they had fallen, half-sunk into continents and seas, their towers shattered, their engines dead, their immense bodies slowly becoming mountains.
Then life returned.
Rain softened the ash. Green pushed through black soil. Moss climbed the metal ribs of the fallen ships. Trees rooted in cracked decks and broken gun towers. Rivers cut new paths around hulls that had once crossed the emptiness between galaxies. Birds nested in the hollow spires. Vines wrapped themselves around weapons large enough to level cities.
The planet did not forgive the wound. It simply grew over it.
From high above, the world became green again. Blue seas returned. Clouds drifted white across the sky. The scars vanished beneath forests, hills, and time until the planet almost looked untouched, almost.
Then the vision narrowed. Bruce fell toward the world. Down through cloud. Down over a vast continent. Down across a cold stretch of sea toward a large island off its coast, its shape strange and familiar enough to remind him of Britain?
Before he could understand, the vision pulled him lower still, toward a smaller island near the shore. Stone walls crowned a hill above the water. Blue roofs glimmered beneath the gray sky. A castle stood there, hard and lonely, with a tower rising against the wind. Bruce was drawn straight toward it.
The tower window rushed closer. Stone filled his sight. Then everything went dark, and Bruce woke again inside warmth.
For a moment, he did not understand where he was.
Was he in the tower?
He tried to look around, but there was nothing to see. Only the same close dark, the same warmth, the same little body forming around him.
Yet, there was something different about this new body being made.
He was not growing into the same kind of body he had known before. Not the heavy, oversized thing that had hurt his mother during birth. This body felt lighter, smaller, fine-boned. The limbs forming around him seemed delicate, quick, almost careful.
Not strong like before, but like a tool made for another purpose. Bruce did not know what to think about that.
Then the world outside began to leak in. Sound arrived slowly at first, muffled and distant, as if heard through walls and water. A hearth crackled somewhere nearby. Wind pressed against stone. Farther away, gulls cried. Beneath that, he heard the faint life of a settlement: voices, animals, work, the dull rhythm of people living close together. Stone of what probably was a small tower room echoed around him.
Then Bruce felt something heavy pressing down on his peaceful little world.
At first he thought the warmth around him had shifted on its own, but then the bed above him creaked, the wooden frame groaning under a weight it was never meant to hold. A man's breath followed, low and rough, then a deep satisfied sound that carried through flesh and bone. Beneath it came a woman's voice, sweet by nature but strained now, caught somewhere between pain, anger, and a shame her body had no permission to feel.
Bruce went still.
He did not understand exactly what was happening. His knowledge of what men and women did in beds had never been good, and being a half-formed baby floating in the dark did not improve it. But he understood pressure. He understood force. He understood the shape of someone smaller trapped beneath someone stronger.
The woman shook, and Bruce's whole little world shook with her. The bed complained harder. The man above her laughed softly, pleased by sounds she did not seem to want to make, and pressed his weight down as if reminding her that she could not move him.
Bruce did not like that laugh.
It reminded him of arrests gone wrong, of suspects pinned to the ground while he and Frank tried to keep control. He remembered smaller people twisting under his hands, frightened and furious, while he tried not to hurt them, tried to tell them to stop resisting, tried to believe the badge made the weight of him different.
But this was not that.
This was not protection. This was power taking what it wanted.
When the man finally stilled, his breathing came heavy and satisfied. For a moment he stayed where he was, keeping his weight over her even after the struggle had ended. Then he shifted away. Leather rustled. Cloth followed. Metal clinked: mail rings, belt buckles, the scrape of a sword settling back into its scabbard.
The woman spat at him.
Bruce heard the wet sound of it landing.
For a heartbeat there was silence. Then the man laughed, not angry, not insulted, only amused, as if her hatred were something charming.
When he spoke, the words were English, but not any English Bruce knew. It was much older, like something pulled from history.
"Thou art steadfast," the man said, his voice still smiling. "And wilful of heart. That is good. God Himself knows it. Therefore I am certain thou shalt yet give me a son, mighty and worthy, one who shall rise and rule this realm."
The woman answered in another tongue entirely, sharp and northern, full of ice and fire. Bruce understood none of the words, but he understood the hatred in them.
The man stepped closer again, and his voice softened in a way that did not feel soft at all.
"Lili," he said, lingering on the name. "Thy defiance is fair to behold. Yet sooner or later, thou shalt fall to my charms."
She gave him no answer.
Her silence was not surrender. It was refusal.
The man only sounded more pleased. "Rest now. My servants shall bring thee supper. Think again upon thine affection toward me, for I love thee already."
Bruce hearing the tone of the words, could not help but feel that something really bad was going on here.
Luckily the man then walked away. Boots struck stone. A heavy door opened. Cold air shifted through the room. Then an iron lock clicked, and his footsteps descended somewhere beyond the wall, down a stairwell that swallowed him piece by piece. The door shut behind him, and the lock turned from the outside.
Silence returned.
Then the woman broke. She cried into the bed, not softly or prettily, but like someone trying not to fall apart and failing anyway. Rage and grief twisted together in every breath. One hand pressed down over her belly, over Bruce, and when she spoke again, her voice was shaking: "Þat er allt í lagi, lítil mær mín… Þú munt verða heil. Ek sver… ek læt hann eigi fá þik."
The words were foreign and Bruce did not understand them, but the light-heart did, or maybe some deeper part of him did.
It was a promise of sorts. As if she had told him, "It's all right, little one. You will be safe. I swear it. I will not let him have you."
Something inside Bruce went very still. Then very certain as he chose a side, her side.
The Godling had told him to be brave, to work on becoming better so he could help others. Well, someone needed help right now. Bruce did not know where he was, what year it was, what world this was, or whether he was human, mole, or some weird tower baby, but he knew this much: he did not want to be useless again.
He did not want to float in the dark and do nothing while someone suffered close enough for him to feel her shaking.
If he was going to help anyone, he had to become capable first.
So Bruce worked.
Inside the warm dark, he clenched the little hands that were barely hands, again and again, counting each attempt like a real exercise. He curled what would become his legs. He tightened his tiny middle, imagining crunches, sit-ups, training mats, and Frank counting reps in that dry voice of his.
One hundred hand-clenches. One hundred tiny crunches. One hundred kicks.
Then he ran, or not truly as there was nowhere to run. But he imagined it anyway, ghost-steps in the dark, pushing forward because forward was all he had ever understood.
He would do it every day, until his lungs learned air, until his eyes opened, until he was born into whatever world waited outside that tower.
Above him, the woman named Lili cried until exhaustion softened her breath. Her heartbeat slowed to a gentler rhythm, as Bruce listening to it kept training.
He made her a promise she could not hear, "This time, I won't mess up, I'll be useful."